Page 32 of Hold on Tight

Gawd.

And yet, she couldn’t quite find it in herself to completely regret it.

It wasn’t like he was just some guy. He wasthatguy. That guy whose mouth she absolutely 100 percent shouldn’t stick her tongue into. That guy who’d always had the ability to make her abandon caution. And she knew that ability, multiplied by the effect of his being Sam’s dad, multiplied by his being an alpha guy who wanted to call the shots, would equal, like, 600 million.

“What’s going on, girl?” Opal asked. “And don’t lie to me. I know it’s not nothing. I just told you I could get you a pair of Louboutins for fifty bucks if you played your cards right, and you said, ‘Uh-huh.’ ”

“It’s complicated,” Mira said, and then thought,And I could have kept it simple.

“Maybe that works on some of your friends, but Ilikeit complicated. Serve it up, hon.”

Mira wanted to tell someone. Because there was a part of her that still couldn’t quite believe it was real. That she’d seen him, that she’d told him, that she’d hired him, that she’d kissed him.

That it had felt so good. That she wanted more.

“I did something I really, really, really shouldn’t have.”

“Let me be the judge of that.” Opal took a last bite of sandwich and crumpled her wax paper. She dug into the paper bag and pulled out a gigantic chocolate chip cookie. She unwrapped it and handed half to Mira.

Mira didn’t know Opal super well yet, but the path to real friendship was paved with confessions, and she needed someone to either absolve or condemn her. “Long version, or short version?”

“Um, Mira, have you met me? I’m not conversant with the short version ofanything.”

So Mira told Opal the whole story, starting with the long, long time ago part, and leading right up to the present.

Opal proved to be as good a listener as she was a talker. “You’re right,” she said, when Mira was done. “Complicated.”

“I wish I could un-kiss him,” Mira said.

Opal tilted her head and gave Mira a doubtful look.

Under her scrutiny, Mira caved and laughed. “No, you’re right. You know what I really wish? I wish he weren’t Sam’s father. I wish he were just some guy. And I could tell him I wanted to have a nonserious, fling-y type thing with him, and it wouldn’t be complicated at all. I wouldn’t have to worry that he’d want to move in and start making decisions about Sam’s upbringing, or that Sam would find out who Jake was and then something would go wrong and Sam would be crushed.”

“And you have reason to think something would go wrong?”

“He’s grumpy and messed up in the head …” She gave Opal a quick outline of Jake’s explanation of why she shouldn’t want him.

Opal smiled, all dimples and teeth. “Sounds like a real prize.”

“So you see why I’m not supposed to get involved with him.”

“I do.” Opal’s smile faded.

“But?”

“Well, despite all that, you kissed him—why?”

“He—I—” She could feel the heat rising in her face as she remembered. “God. It’s, like …” But words seemed to have failed her completely.

“Oh, hon,” Opal said, her big, freckled face as sad as Mira had seen it. “In my experience, ‘not supposed to’ is areallyflimsy barrier against chemistry like that.”

Jake waited in a cushy chair in the new prosthetist’s office, an unfamiliar sensation in his stomach. Like nerves, only not quite. Like—

Like maybe he was looking forward to this visit. To getting fitted for a new socket and a new running leg. Just a little.

He sighed. Or maybe he was just having a flashback to another recent stint in a waiting room, when the world had shifted abruptly under him, the landslide that had dumped him out of one kind of uncertainty and into another.

Jake’s PT had told him it would take several months to get an appointment with Harwood, who was new to the University of Washington prosthetics and orthotics group, fresh off a stint at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, but the receptionist had called him this morning to tell him there’d been a cancellation.

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